More surprising is the way the vice-chancellors - especially the Group of Eight - fed Pyne the lines with which to screw everything up.

So we've all got the gist of the plans, right? It seems
that Pyne plans to overhaul the type and manner of students’ financial
contribution to higher education. Adjustments to the proportion of students’
contribution have been under discussion for a long time. There are some good
arguments for reconsidering this share, certainly in some areas of study, but for Pyne, it seems that such a change to fee structures should also come with a
broader deregulation of the system. This would see private colleges ‘competing’
with universities for students.

This policy
seems to have the support of the Group of Eight universities and several of
their vice-chancellors. In his London speech, Minister Pyne used University of
Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis’ line ‘Competition between universities is
good. It keeps you focused on your students’. It was thoughtful of Professor
Davis* to give Pyne such a quote, for it aligns perfectly with what both Pyne
and Norton believe about higher education: that increased competition is the best
way to make universities better.

More money
would help too, acknowledges Norton; so why not combine the two ideals? If
universities need to compete harder to get additional money, they need to offer
real quality education. Then they
will be able to compete with those pesky overseas institutions that keep
encroaching on our international student market.

There have
been disturbing hints that Pyne holds the United States’ higher education
sector as an ideal to which Australian universities should aspire. Sometimes in
the past such aspirations have really only meant Harvard. This is problematic
given that Harvard is wealthier than many small countries: no Australian university
will ever be able to ‘compete’ with that. It is hard to believe that Pyne means
anything beyond Harvard, however, for it is widely acknowledged – even from a
conservative point of view – that the rest of American higher education is in
real trouble and so (as a result) is the labour market that they feed. This is because, as I hinted a few days ago, more is at stake than whether a university degree adds wealth to your life as opposed to not getting a degree. Now, entering many segments of the labour market just can't be done without a university degree anymore. Think of all the professions that you now need to go to university to enter. It started with Engineering, then included Accounting. Later Business. Then Teaching, Nursing. Journalism. Even Policing is becoming a university thing. Wine making, even. Pretty much anything that leads to money or power in Australia means sending your children through university. Universities no longer need to persuade people that what they offer is valuable: they've captured the gateway to nearly any decent job at all.

In some disciplines, the degree your receive is far, far more likely to support you to get a job if it is from an elite university. So - as in the United States - when the fee disparity between universities also reflects their elitism this holds the middle class to ransom - pay or lose socio-economic status. This has burdened the middle class with debts that they have been able to afford - until now. Fees can't increase further. For universities, their costs continually matched their rate of growth so that NOW, now that they have reached the point where the middle class can no longer bear any more fee increases and low-SES people can't afford to go at all (but also can't really afford not to), universities are in trouble. Salaries keep increasing, buildings keep needing repairs, costs keep increasing but fees can't. Big problem for universities, of course, but what about society? All those jobs need doing by people with degrees; innovation, fuelled by educated thinkers underpins national competitiveness; but higher education is decreasingly positioned to make those things happen.

Aspirational people from low-SES backgrounds have far more challenges than that and, in America, many were persuaded to invest in higher education only to find the other pressures were too high, leaving them WORSE OFF since they now have educational debt that is of no value to them since they did not finish - and which sometimes they can now not repay, leading to the downward spiral of defaulted debt and…you can see the problem.

Australian universities have been protected from many of America's problems (both
internally and in the labour market), largely by HECS – thus far, anyway. But for the Norton-Pyne-Kemp ideology of competition to work, students need to be LESS protected by HECS, otherwise the competitive process they idealise can't function. So Andrew Norton's History, which he says in this article shows that low-SES students are not put off by fees, needs some work - or at least some nuancing, for it is HECS THE WAY IT IS NOW that has protected everyone. And we can not exactly call the current system a success in socio-economic terms, for low-SES participation (particularly in rural Australia and among Aboriginal students) is abysmally low and has barely improved in twenty years…until we had some recent work on the problem, which shows some slight improvements, but still a long way to go.

Nevertheless,
the desire for Australian universities to be competitive in ways that go beyond
crude (and largely useless) global rankings underpins the push for
deregulation. Both Pyne and Norton seem persuaded that, universally, more
competition will breed quality. It sounds
good. But they are overlooking a few things.

Firstly, no
private college will ever compete with our big, old elite and public
universities. Of course the Group of
Eight can support increased competition because they will not actually have
any. Australia's public university system is unlike the USA's or even Britain's
in this respect. The Universities of Melbourne and Sydney especially, but also
Adelaide, Queensland, UWA, ANU, Monash and UNSW, can happily sit atop the
competitive pile and, in a deregulated system, charge the highest fees. [This is not an excuse, dear Go8 vice-chancellors, for your job should have gone beyond the level of self-interest you're showing here to a type of leadership that cared not only for your own institutions and not even just for the sector but also for society and Australia's labour market].

Higher
education in Australia is not the same market as private schooling. Wealthy,
elite parents expect their children to get into (say) Sydney or Melbourne on
government-supported places. In fact, for some, this is the purpose of paying
all those private school fees. No fee-paying college or university has a chance
of competing for the elitism of these old bastions of socio-economic advantage.
And Andrew Norton’s article shows that that is not the purpose of private
colleges anyway.

Private
sector colleges are not proposed in
order to make the elite universities work harder to get the best students and
teach them in a manner that keeps the flow of good students flowing; they are
there to sequester low-SES students who have a lower ATAR away from the elite.
These impoverished students will pay fees – lower fees than at university to be
sure – in pathway programs that may or may not make up for the reality that the
education system was designed to ensure a vast majority of their more
privileged peers get into commonwealth supported places at the top universities
while their own chances are far smaller. There is, embedded in this role, no
prospect of competition between the private sector and the elite universities.
They will clearly not be comparable institutions.

Even if
there were actual competition at stake, the argument that competition
stimulates quality still does not work. It is true that in many areas of
economic life competition and quality go hand in hand. But in universities, Norton’s
approach to ‘demand’ ignores the reality that there is no structural connection
between the sources of quality and the sources of competition. Not one academic
teacher has ever sat in a classroom determined to do a good job because they
want to ensure the university’s marketing team meets their targets. What is
frustrating about this is that many academics, myself included, agree that quality
in Australian universities needs some real attention. Blindly believing that
competition will breed quality without examining how quality is actually made
is ideology, not policy.

It is
certainly time, too, that the nation’s least advantaged students stop getting
the blame for quality failures in the system. The correlation of low-SES and
low ATAR that Andrew Norton noted should constitute a national emergency, for
it is statistically unlikely that poorer people are in fact any less
intelligent. We do the nation and our education systems a disservice by giving
up on them as we often have. It is the same as sport. If the only people who make the national sporting teams were those able to pay for elite coaching we KNOW we are missing out on the nation's best talent. When the elite universities mainly attract students from certain SES backgrounds, we also miss out on the best, regardless of ATAR. We have evidence, even. Once low-SES students make it past their first year,
they do as well and often better than their more privileged peers. The last
thing any educational reform should do is add barriers and costs to their
pathway to success. Indeed everyone loses if we do. No one actually benefits from impoverished under-educated communities, not even wealthy conservatives.

What has me confused is why university leaders are not making this case. For while we might well expect this ideology-based policy from politicians and the report-writers that they commission, there is no excuse for the fact that it has been the vice-chancellors feeding Pyne the lines he has needed to potentially sabotage a higher education system that needs work of a far different kind.

* Disclosure. I participate in a research project on the history of universities that includes Melbourne VC Glyn Davis as a chief investigator. Clearly (from this post) this association does not mean I feel unable to criticise him or the role of the Go8 VCs.

Although Sharrock is pretty right, generally I think the 'how much will I have to pay?' is the wrong question to ask about this budget, which ought to be asking why the Group of Eight have fed the government everything they needed to argue for this when they claim they don't know how the market will behave (that is…I am pretty sure they are pretty confident). They are confident not only because of their market position, but because the labour market now demands degrees - and increasingly demands elite ones. If you wish to enter the labour market and you're not suited to a trade (hello, most women…and plenty, plenty of others), people will HAVE to pay to go to uni or they won't get a job. Putting this is a consumer 'choice' or an 'investment' is misleading…and it is utterly ridiculous to think the VCs of elite universities are speaking as objective academic observers when they choose the way they talk about this.

I am cranky with the government over what looks like utterly irresponsible policy. But I am furious with the vice-chancellors, who ought to know better and who are there to give the government and the public good advice, not this commercially self-interested crap.

Over the past few years I've occasionally taken issue with something Simon Marginson says. But in the article absolutely everything he says is 100% spot on. This is the thing to read about the effects of Pyne on higher education...http://theconversation.com/higher-education-the-age-of-pyne-the-destroyer-begins-26483For example:"The leading universities can also put money into scholarships for students from under-represented social groups, but the use of academic criteria for entry ensures that they will continue to be dominated by families from affluent backgrounds that can afford to invest in academically strong secondary schools."GRRRRRRRRR.

Sunday, 4 May 2014

I read this morning that our current education minister thinks that university graduates should pay for more of their education because they benefit considerably.

It seems that all the VCs agree that students need to pay more (or more likely they think that SOMEONE ought to pay more and think that students are the ones that the current government is most likely to look to).

I also read that it is possible that HELP (used to be called HECS) debt repayments might begin at 32,000 because the government needs them paid back or else something bad might happen.

Fee policy is not quite my field I'll admit, but I do think the HECS system (pretty much what we have) designed by 1980s Labor is excellent. I don't mind the idea that the people who benefit should share some of the cost. This is partly what prevents working class Australia from over-subsidising the education of the elite.

In fact, I think the education minister should think seriously about asking the people who benefit the most to contribute teh highest share.

If I was reforming the fee system, I'd start by adding a graduate tax to HECS aimed at the people who benefit from their education the most. Start it in a small way at (say) those university graduates earning more than $80,000 a year and increase it from there. Doing it this way rather than with the HELP debt would make sure those who benefit really are the ones who pay.

And really, how much does the government reckon they can squeeze out of graduates earning $32,000 and paying rent in Sydney? Doesn't sound like much of a solution to me...

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About Me

I have kept this blog since 2008. In that time I completed a PhD in the history department at the University of Sydney called “The Ownership of Knowledge in Higher Education in Australia, 1939-1996” and have begun new work. This blog recounts my pathway through my research and thinking to include work on social inclusion, historiography, labour history and the history of knowledge. Hopefully it goes without saying that anything here is a draft. It is a blog, not a book. Lots of times I could be wrong - if I am, please tell me.